Rough Magic is an original prequel to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, depicting the relationship between Ariel (Lindsay Bellaire) and Caliban (Phillip Psutka) from the moment they met right up until the storm conjuring that opens The Tempest.

I saw Theatre Arcturus’ Weird: The Witches of Macbeth in 2015 and raved about it just a bit. It was my first recommendation when anybody asked me what I saw and loved (and what I heard from a lot of people in return).

Rough Magic was everything I’d wanted from a Theatre Arcturus follow-up and once again, it’s the first one I mention when people ask what I’ve seen and loved.

Captain Nick Di Gaetano of the Echolalea is an astronaut aboard Earth’s first spacecraft capable of reaching light speed. Not this, Earth, mind you. He’s just stopping by to visit. After a two year journey out to where the first test of the light speed drive is to happen, he runs into an anomaly that leaves Captain Nick unstuck and bouncing between parallel Earths, trying to find a way home to his wife and cat.

DEB Talks consists of “D-Displaying E-Exceptional B-Bullshit” by a group of unqualified experts with some very bad ideas. It’s a lampooning of TED Talks, if you haven’t figured that much out, through a series of solo character sketches with no narrative purpose but to make you laugh. Which it does well.

Written and performed by Deborah Ring, who breaks out new hair and a few accesories for each character, succeeds in cracking her audience up from the opening powerpoint presentation introduction. No, I mean it, from beginning to end. Laughs. Lots and lots of laughs. Lots of them. I’m not kidding.Read the full review.

Category 1: Six shows you can take to the bank:

Bank is important. Having a known reputation for delivering quality is hardcore in a festival where quality isn’t always guaranteed. These are artists with proven reputations for delivering an A-Game. If their promo material / press / marketing gets you interested in their shows, you can count on them for quality and won’t go wrong buying a ticket.

Dead Unicorn Ink (Ten Little Sinners)

Martin Dockery (Delirium)

AL Connors (AL Connors: DJ Detective)

Jem Rolls (The Inventor of All Things)

Vanessa Quesnelle (Luna)

Nancy Kenny (Your Princess Is In Another Castle)

(Note: there are certainly other artists at Fringe with bankable names, ask around and people will be happy to tell you, I limited to the top ones I have first hand knowledge of. Comment below if you something to add.)

Category 2: My personal top four “Can’t Miss” shows:

Ten Little Sinners: Dead Unicorn Ink has a high reputation of delivering entertainment with a broad appeal. From as far back as Playing Dead and Space Mysteries From Outer Space, they work in the genre of crowd-pleasing theatre and tend to become quick fan favourites. Plus they’ve got a great cast going. Mark my words, this show will be selling out Academic Hall by the end of the festival. (If it doesn’t do so from the beginning.)

Rough Magic @ Ottawa Fringe 2017 (photo cred: Larry Carroll)

Rough Magic: Two years ago, Theatre Arcturus came to town with Weird: The Witches of Macbeth. It blew me away enough that I saw the show twice (which is the highest and rarest mark of quality I can give a show). Seeing that Theatre Arcturus was coming back with Rough Magic was all I needed to know for it to make this short list.

Delirium: Martin Dockery is a king in the world of solo-storytelling shows. Perhaps The King, though subjective opinions may vary. He’s been touring through Ottawa every year since 2012, I’ve seen every show he’s put up, I’ve loved every show he’s put up. Wanderlust and last year’s Exclusion Zone probably being my favourites. His way with words, his style of performing them, and his knack for narrative will all dazzle you. Plus he’s an all round chill and good guy.

Unbridled Futurism: Is quirky a genre? While I think that nearly everyone will find enjoyment in Ten Little Sinners, Rough Magic, and Delirium, I can’t make as strong a guarantee with Unbridled Futurism because not even I really know what to expect. Here’s what I do know. I fell in love with Nick Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman’s MiCasa Theatre back in 2012 with Live From The Belly of a Whale. I fell in love all over again with REVISED from the Belly of a Whale. And it’s to my greatest shame to say that I continue to miss every single opportunity to see Countries Shaped Like Stars. While Unbridled Futurism isn’t a MiCasa Theatre project, I’ll happily take one half of the duo any chance I can get. They’re that amazing. I fully expect that whether or not this is a show people are buzzing about at the beginning of the festival, it’s one of the ones that everybody will be talking about by the end of the festival.

Category 3: Honourable mentions (or the shows I’ll be trying my damnedest to get out to):

Luna: With the aforementioned Vanessa Quesnelle. First solo show she’s brought to Ottawa, but her two-handers with Martin Dockery (and one three hander) have shown her to be a powerhouse performer in her own right.

The ADHD Project: Carlyn Rhamey’s SAOR was one of the few shows I was able to get to last year. It was all I needed to convince me to keep The ADHD Project near the top of my list.

Who, Me: Marketing is everything at Fringe. I’ve talked about it before. There’s no chance a Doctor Who themed/marketed show won’t attract the crowd it sets out to. Myself included.

Movin’ Melvin Brown: Less traditional theatre, more kick back in a Vegas lounge and watch “the last of the great song & dance men” entertain you for an hour and then some.

Underneath It All, Tooth:Hurty, The Sellout, Ethel, HOOTENANNY!: All featuring outstanding local performers who I adore.**Your Princess is Not in Another Castle is not listed in that group only because it’s noted as “presented as a workshop” which means I know I’ll likely get the chance to see it again down the road, and so it won’t break my heart quite as much to miss it. If I find an opening in my schedule to fit this show in, you can bet I will do so.

Do You Want To Live Forever, The Illiad for Dummies: Grabbed my interest from their concept and marketing.

Category 4: …?

Really, I could go and find reasons to push nearly every show at the festival if I tried, but my list above comes down to what I’m most looking forward to that are the best bets to deliver quality and entertainment when I sit down in the audience.

But, as always, this is simply my opinion and I would love to know what you think. What have I overlooked? What are you looking forward to? If you’re reading this in the future, what have you seen and loved and want everybody to see? Join the discussion and tell me in the comments below. Alternately, hit me up on Instagram or Twitter at @ThatMackeyGuy

Depending on your age, thoughts of The Addams Family may conjure entirely different memories. If you grew up in the early 90s, The Addams Family might be Gomez and Morticia nearly losing the family fortune to an impostor Uncle Fester in a highly successful movie that starred a ten year old Christina Ricci as a deeply deadpan Wednesday Addams. If you were of age in the 60s or 70s, the Addams Family might be a black & white sitcom, complete with laugh track and a bubbly, younger Wednesday Addams. Heck, if you’re under 25, you might not have any prior experience with The Addams Family at all.Here’s your one minute primer/reminder video. (links to youtube)

The Addams Family is a looking glass put up in front of your typical suburban nuclear family. Dad (Gomez), mom (Morticia), a pair of kids (Wednesday and Pugsley), complete with grandma, dear Uncle Fester, and lumbering butler, Lurch. They’re probably a lot like you and your family — except that their interests and likes tend to lean towards the macabre and ghastly, which to them are normal as day. Normal, in fact, to the point of not seeing how anybody would think them odd at all.Read the full review.

Five good friends drop down to a foursome after one disappears under mysterious circumstances. Now, years later, the quartet is reduced again with the very recent death of their fourth to prolonged illness. The three have gotten together to remember the life of the recently departed at the behest of his estranged daughter, Eve, who they’ve never met. With Eve’s arrival, what appeared to be a simple look back at her father’s life with his dearest friends quickly begins to feel like so much more, with Eve’s probing questions into their past and her knowing significantly more about all three of them than she should — including more than a few dark and buried secrets.

Written and directed by John Muggleton, Burn is a well-crafted and highly suspenseful ride that manages to keep you intrigued for the duration as to what Eve’s game is and where we’ll ultimately end up. Good pacing and having expert storyteller, Megan Carty, in the role of Eve makes for a tension filled slow burn of the script’s reveals.Read the full review.

With Wendla’s opening lament of not feeling that her mother has properly taught her the things she needs to know about life, Spring Awakening: The Musical is the story of a group of young teenagers struggling with the transition from adolescence into adulthood in a repressive 19th century society.

Spring Awakening: The Musical is Orpheus Musical Theatre’s leap towards serving a younger, hipper audience. Making use of the new, state of the art Centrepointe Theatre Studio as their stage, the idea is to present a different branch of musical theatre compared to the large scale mass appeal musicals Orpheus is known for. Indeed, when I first saw that Orpheus had announced Spring Awakening for this season, I’d thought, “Bold move. Certainly not your typical Orpheus fare.”

Much Ado About Nothing sees wild-haired Leonato open his home to Don Pedro and comrades Claudio and Benedict following their return from war. Claudio and Leonato’s daughter, Hero, go googly-eyed for each other instantly while Benedict and Hero’s cousin, Beatrice, reignite their fiery antagonism equally instantly. While Don John, his comrades, and Hero work to trick Benedict and Beatrice to falling for one another, the villainous, dressed-in-black, Don John (brother of Don Pedro) schemes to ruin Hero’s reputation and undo her pending nuptials to Claudio for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. DJ’s ploy works and after a public shaming by her betrothed, Hero melodramatically drops dead on the spot. In actuality she simply faints but Camp Leonato decides to let everybody think she has died while they work to prove that Claudio made much ado about nothing.

It’s your basic romcom, essentially. As such it requires you to buy into that same premise that Romeo & Juliet and 95% of non-modern fairy tales ask of you. That true love is hella powerful and you need to take it as a given that these folk may as well already have a long established relationship for as invested as they are in one another after what in reality is such a short time.Read the full review.

William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar tells of the events leading to and following the assassination of Rome’s would be emperor. It begins with Caesar’s victory over his rival Pompei, showing how adored he is by the masses, and it ends in all out war between his betrayers and friends to decide who will succeed him.

Julius Caesar is something of an odd play. It’s sort of like staccato storytelling with an abrupt narrative that leaves scenes feeling detached from each other rather than having a natural dramatic flow. Perhaps it’s because we’re thrust so far into what could be the middle (or end) of a story that the title implies should be about Julius Caesar when it’s the other characters (Brutus/Marc Antony/et al) who drive the story forward. And because he is such an notable and renowned character, it’s hard to deny him as the focal point of the few scenes he’s in before dying two thirds through act one. On the other hand, when you consider the dialogue and the key speeches, Julius Caesar is a brilliant piece of writing. Mark Antony’s speech at the end of act one is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I can think of.Read the full review.

Staged, in director Andy Massingham’s new adaptation, in 1950s Venice, The Servant of Two Masters is a commedia masterpiece with the melodramatic overtones of an Italian telenovela. For those who aren’t familiar, commedia dell’arte, is a highly physical, highly stylized genre of comedic theatre characterized in part by masks, stock character types (devious servants, lustful maids, young lovers, miserly old merchants) and twistedly intricate yet simple to follow plots. It is a wonderful form of classic theatre, highly accessible for even the most theatre averse to just let go and laugh.

Truffaldino is servant to Frederigo. Truffaldino is hungry. After a chance meeting, Truffaldino figures he can double his money and meals by taking on a second master and secretly double dealing. Only the real Frederigo is dead and the person that everybody thinks is Freddie, is actually his twin sister Beatrice, dressed in the guise of her brother to collect cash money owed to him by the miserly Pantalone and also to track down her lover Florindo who, as fate would have it, is Truffaldino’s second master. Oh, and Pantolone’s daughter Clarice, in love with the overzealous Silvio, was promised to Frederigo, and so Beatrice has to play along with the engagement to keep her ruse going, much to Clarice and Silvio’s anguish. It’s an uproarious love story full of crazy hijinks, duplicity, briefly broken hearts, romance, and genuine “aw” moments.

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